My Father’s Example
on Appreciating Paternal Influence in the Right Direction
I’m not really sure what my dad believed. He was a Christian, though one I think more of commitment than conviction. A Protestant, he couldn’t have conceived of being a Catholic or even an Episcopalian or Lutheran, no more than I as a New Englander could conceive of being a Yankees fan. For the last twenty-some years of his life, he was an elder in a congregationalist-style church, heavily involved, but then he was the pastor’s best friend.
My parents started going to church when I was eight or so, I think for the usual middle-class reasons. They wanted help raising their children, and they saw going to church as the respectable thing to do, something people like them did. At least my mother did. She had grown up in a family half-secular (grandfather was an active Mason) and half irregularly practicing Methodists (grandmother was a Methodist). My father’s family had not gone to church at all.
I’m thinking now that my mother much more than my father wanted to go to church, and I wonder if we ever would have gone had the decision been left to him alone. It’s humbling to think that the thing that drives my life now, I may not have known at all, if my dad had not wanted to make his wife happy.
We attended church off and on for some years, meaning I didn’t grow up with the idea that church was normal and normative. It was something we did when my parents felt like it, like going out to dinner when we could afford it. They eventually started going every week, to a small church in the country, but by then my attitude to the whole enterprise had been formed. It was their thing, not mine.
The church they were going to when I turned twelve expected everyone at that age to get baptized, and I refused. I didn’t believe in it, and I wasn’t going to get soaking wet for a show. My dad never said a word about it, and I have no idea if my refusal bothered him or not.
An Engineer’s Mind
As far as I remember, my parents had no theological commitments. My mother would have had them if either parent did, and hers would have been broad and affirming. It was a religion of Jesus as savior and not much else, beyond some cultural rules the people in their circles took as Christian teaching.
Only years later, when I started reading on my own, did I find that Christianity had set beliefs, that it had a structure with hard angles and edges, and a shape that didn’t bend and didn’t fold up for convenience. Smart people thought about the ultimate questions in a rigorous, systematic way, a way that offered some chance of finding an answer, not leaving us with tastes and preferences.
It baffles me that my dad didn’t find theology interesting, at least for the systematic way theologians worked it all out and for the applications. He was a civil engineer, with an engineer’s mind for systems and structures, and with the civil engineer’s pleasure in making things work in the real world.
Intellectually, I went my own way. I read a lot, and for much of my teenage years was absorbed in secular writers. Camus especially I loved for his belief that the world had no meaning, but that he would live as if it did. He was one of my heroes for that, as was George Orwell. I enjoyed Thomas Hardy’s novels for their pessimism. I saw no need for religion in my life. My dad gave me no reason to feel I needed it or should want it.
I also loved Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which I first read at twelve. What I loved then, I see now, was its implicit Catholicism. My dad read it, once. With the zeal of the fan, I asked him how he liked it, and he said, tactfully, “It’s a good story.” He certainly didn’t get the Catholic elements. It was an adventure story with funny creatures, the kind of thing his artsy son liked.
The Job of Dying
Religion was not something we talked about. He read all the time, but I don’t remember him ever reading the Bible on his own. For a few years, he read the Bible to my sister and me before bed, but once he finished the chapter, he put it down. He didn’t engage the text at all, much less try to teach us anything from it. He must have prayed, but if so, I never saw him praying, except in later years when as an elder in his church he sometimes led the prayers.
Readers may be wondering why we didn’t talk about religion. We talked about a lot of things, deep things and shallow things. It never occurred to me to talk about religion. We had diverged so much, and my religious formation was so entirely my own, that I suppose I felt we wouldn’t have anything to talk about. He was happy doing what he was doing, and that was all I asked.
He died in 2004, of lung cancer, whose return had been discovered on the very day the doctor had planned to declare him cured. He was really, I think, at heart a Stoic, as he showed when he went about dying. His was presumably a stoicism supported by the Christian hope, but he would probably have lived his life the same way had he not been a Christian. He would have been a very virtuous pagan.
As I wrote about him in First Things: “He knew who he was and what he was called to do, a condition others would put in a theological language I suspect he thought was unnecessary. He was dying. That was his job, and he would do it as well as he could.”
I was in my forties then, but he showed me “that to die with dignity means to accept what God has given you and deal with it till the end. It means to play the hand God has dealt you, no matter how bad a hand it is, without folding. It means actually to live as if the Lord gives, and the Lord takes away, and in either case blessed be the name of the Lord.”
A Virtuous Stoic
I am the man I am, and the editor and writer I am, in great part because my dad was the man he was. He formed my religious faith in ways that I now, almost fifty years on from my youth, am only just seeing.
This is the way I’d put it. My dad faced the world as a Stoic. A virtuous Stoic, a man of patience and generosity, and humility, and a man who saw and did his duty.
For example, he taught me a patience with people and an acceptance of how differently other people understood the world, against my natural inclinations and the ideological world I lived in as a young man in a university town in the seventies. In response to my youthful certainty and my adolescent desire to divide the world clearly into good guys and villains, he liked to say, “What you see depends on where you sit,” and “It depends on whose ox is gored.”
Which I found infuriating. How could he not see that one side was right and that it mattered? How could he see truth on both sides? Why didn’t he see that my good guys were the good guys? Didn’t he care?
He assumed people had good reasons for believing and doing what they did, and was happy to let them alone. (He was a bit of an anarchist, I see now.) His example made me like Newman, with his concern for how people saw and thought, when I first read him, and that by itself is a very big debt.
He never said the phrase, “There but for the grace of God go I,” that I remember. But he treated others as if he might be them, or they him. He might see things the way they did, or do the things they’d done. He could judge some people harshly—people he thought lazy particularly annoyed him, as his Stoicism had an element of social Darwinism in it—but outside those cases, he saw people with unusual generosity and sympathy. In responding to my adolescent certainties, he used the question, “What if that were you?” as a final moral argument.
Once, when I was a teenager, a man who’d just gotten out of prison started going to their church. I said something stupid about his being an ex-con, and my dad shot me down, sharp and hard. He’d paid his debt, my dad said, and was starting over fresh, and I was not to say anything about his past. His past was gone. He was a man like any other man. Even in my liberal, enlightened college town, that was unusually kind.
My dad also insisted that people tell the truth, and was painfully honest himself, but only when he had to be. He disliked liars even more than lazy people. Unusually tactful, he insisted that you rarely had to say anything, but when you did, you had to tell the truth, whatever the consequences, but you needed to tell only so much truth as you had to tell, and you had to tell it kindly.
I think he felt that complaining when you didn’t really have something to complain about was a kind of lying. Or maybe that was just another expression of his Stoicism. The Boy Who Cried Wolf was a canonical text for him. I still complained too much, not being so stoical as my father, but I’ve also always felt that the complaints must be accurate. I could cry wolf, but only if the wolf had come. And however unfair I felt it, I had to do what I had to do, even if that meant being eaten.
How Much I Owe
I could write more. He had many other admirable qualities that formed me as well as these. But these are the ones I have felt most as I’ve grown older. They didn’t point me to Christianity, much less the Catholic Church. If anything, they pointed to the Camusian and Orwellian existentialist revolt against evil to which I was already inclined.
But I don’t think I would have found my way to faith without him. The belief in truth I learned from him bound me to the truth when I saw it. Even when I tried to evade it, or forget it, I’d keep coming back to it, because I dimly felt I’d disappoint him if I didn’t. (Though heaven knows I must still have successfully evaded and forgotten some truths.)
His generosity towards others and his understanding that the world looks different to different people had the same effect. It relativized my own certainties and problematized, as academics might say, my commitments. I learned (eventually, after years as an active ideological combatant) to listen to others and try to see things from their point of view, which helped me respond to them more charitably and refined and deepened my own understanding.
I owe my father a lot. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen more clearly how much, and I regret not having been more like him when I was younger. I can’t imagine how different my life might be had he not been the man he was.
David Mills has been editor of Touchstone and executive editor of First Things. He edits the opinion page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on Family from the online archives
33.2—March/April 2020
Christian Pro-Family Governments?
Old & New Lessons from Europe by Allan C. Carlson
31.1—January/February 2018
The Wisdom of the Victorian Quest for Innocence by David Sandifer
32.1—January/February 2019
on Down Syndrome & the Lives That Matter by David F. Watson
more from the online archives
31.4—July/August 2018
Labels & the Ecumenism of Discipleship by James M. Kushiner
31.4—July/August 2018
The Difficulty of Apologetics for Dead Souls in the Real World by R. J. Snell
27.2—March/April 2014
on C. S. Lewis & the New State Paganism by W. E. Knickerbocker
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
